chapter 1 weighing the evidence - university of … · 2015-11-27 · in the company of chambertin....

The famous anecdote of the Faubourg Saint-Germain told by Brillat-Savarin, which I have used as an epigraph, reveals an educated andeclectic connoisseur who varies his wines to suit the food he eats, theweather, and his mood. Brillat-Savarin himself, another amiable judge,delighted in having been born in Belley, at the gates of the ancient cap-ital of the Gauls, a land superbly irrigated by all the fine red wines ofFrance: “Lyons is a town of good living: its location makes it richequally in the wines of Bordeaux and Hermitage and Burgundy.”1 Hedoes not say that these wines are frequently mixed in the secrecy of thenégociant’s warehouse, a practice that was already venerable in his timeand that one hopes has now, at the beginning of the twenty-first cen-tury, finally ceased.

Many poets, bacchic or other, have sung of their fondness for Bor-deaux and Burgundy. Thus André Chénier, on the eve of the Revolution:

On the blessed banks of Beaune and Aï,In rich Aquitaine, and the lofty Pyrenees,From their groaning presses flow streamsOf delicious wines ripened on their slopes.2

Even if Thomas Jefferson passionately loved the great wines of Bor-deaux, he also had a high regard for those of Burgundy, which we

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know he thoroughly enjoyed on passing through the Côte d’Or inMarch 1787.3 In the early nineteenth century, the chansonnier MarcAntoine Désaugiers traveled as far without leaving home:

Friends, it is in preferringThe bottle to the carafeThat the most ignorant manBecomes a good geographer.4

Beaune, land so highly praised,Chablis, Mâcon, Bordeaux, Grave,With what exquisite pleasureI visit you in my cellar!5

And thus, a bit later, the bard of good food and wine, Charles Monselet:

It is one o’clock in the afternoonWhen all the fine wines meet at a feast,The fraternal hour when Lafite appearsIn the company of Chambertin.

No more quarrels nowAmong these valiant friends;No more ill feelingsBetween Gascons and Burgundians . . .

They have shed their clevernessWithout forsaking their style.—After you, monsieur de Lur-Saluces!—After you, my dear Montrachet.

Pommard looks smilingly uponSuave, gentle Brane-Mouton.To Latour no one says, “Beware!”Not even the fiery Corton?6

It is probably among food and wine critics that one is likeliest todayto meet the descendants of these unprejudiced and warm-hearteddrinkers. In La Revue du Vin de France and in many other wine guidesavailable today in France and abroad, the wines of Bordeaux and Bur-

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gundy enjoy a notice that is more or less proportional to their share ofthe market, and the authors of the articles devoted to them show nosign of preference, either declared or concealed, for one or the other.One can only applaud this state of affairs.

In 1963 the Burgundian cellar master and wine taster Pierre Pouponadopted a very civil tone: “I am not jealous of the wines of Bordeaux.These are difficult wines for our Burgundian palates; we have to spenda long time with them, with an open mind, before being able to detecttheir great virtues. But they are so different from ours that I manage tolike them only when I stop trying to compare them.”7 And the Parisianjournalist Bernard Frank cheerfully confessed, “I had probably neverdrunk a single glass of wine when I chose my camp once and for all:Bordeaux rather than Burgundy. Once and for all! But one lives andlearns. Since then I have learned to put some Burgundy in my wine. . . .The palate must give way to the mind.”8 A fine phrase, this last one,which illuminates a whole geography of wine, a geography foundedupon the marriage of pragmatism and the senses.

It is true that in Bordeaux the aristocrats of the vine sometimes con-descend to serve one or another of the great white wines of Burgundyat the splendid feasts they hold in their townhouses on the Pavé desChartrons or in their châteaux. Bernard Ginestet describes a prodigiousluncheon given not so very long ago at Mouton by Baron Philippe deRothschild, one of the most discriminating gourmets and connoisseursof the Médoc:

With the fried filets of sole, sauce tartare, a Montrachet was served,Marquis de Laguiche 1952; a marvelous wine, pale golden yellow incolor, flecked with green tints. It captivated the entire table, which wasunanimous in its praise.

“You spoil us, dear friend Philippe,” declared Édouard Minton.“There is hardly anywhere in all of Bordeaux, except in your home, thatone can drink white Burgundies of such quality. This one is trulymagnificent. We don’t have such wines.”

“Glad you like it, my dear Édouard. For a long while now I have

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exchanged two or three cases of Mouton every year for some Montra-chet from my friend Philibert. Do you know how large his vineyard is?Hardly more than two hectares! I serve this wine only to those who areworthy of it. But I find it agreeable to let my taste buds wander throughother lands.”9

The scene and the dialogue are no doubt unusual (and probablyslightly retouched by Ginestet for effect), but nonetheless they are quiteplausible, for they feature Philippe de Rothschild, the peasant who livedin silk pajamas, as he liked to say, and who translated Shakespeare inbed—a man as far removed from commonplaces as he was from ordi-nary wines. Anybody else in Bordeaux would have served a whiteHaut-Brion or a Carbonnieux—indeed a dry Doisy-Daëne or a “Y”d’Yquem—on such an occasion.

It is probable, too, that Philibert de Laguiche, thanks to the fruitof these exchanges, sometimes arranged surprising marriages for hisguests in Burgundy. Let us imagine the scene. In his Château deChaumont, in the Saône-et-Loire, the marquis is entertaining RobertDrouhin, the director of the venerable house of Joseph Drouhin inBeaune. Drouhin has the privilege of cultivating 2,625 hectares, as wellas making and selling the hundred or so hectoliters of Montrachet pro-duced by the Laguiche family, which for three centuries has possessedthe largest parcel (out of a total area of almost 8 hectares) of this appel-lation. The menu includes a lièvre à la royale, the hare having been mar-inated for a long time and slowly simmered in the lees of the wine to beserved with the dish, which for any self-respecting Burgundian wouldbe a grand cru, either Gevrey or Vosne. The guests are surprised to findthemselves presented instead with a very dark wine in a carafe (thepractice in Burgundy is to serve wine in bottles). A nectar whose prove-nance they cannot guess sends them into ecstasies. “Our red wines fromthe Côte de Beaune are too delicate to stand up to wild rabbit,” Philibertde Laguiche observes. “Rather than resort to the nobility of the Côte deNuits, I thought that the structure and smoothness of a 1945 Mouton

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would go well with the powerful and sensual aromas of the noblestgame of our fields.” One might invert the tale and imagine a Volnayescorting an agneau de Pauillac roasted over vine stock and shoots, thelamb being accompanied by a few boletus mushrooms sautéed in theBordelaise manner; or, more daringly, a fully mature Sauternes with anÉpoisses almost past its time, followed by—indeed, served with—aslice of warm gingerbread from Mulot et Petitjean in Dijon. A fire-works display for the nose!

A VERY FRENCH QUARREL

Exchanges of this sort are unfortunately exceptional in both theGironde and the Côte d’Or.10 Seldom do they do each other such favors.Ask the natives of these two universally renowned wine-producingregions about each other, or read what they have written, and you willnot find the slightest sign of sympathy or fellow feeling. They are notfrom the same world—a fact they miss no occasion to proclaim loudlyand clearly. Not content to ignore each other, hardly tasting each other’swines, they delight in denigrating each other, more or less fiercely.

The Bordelais are annoyed by the subtle smells of the great pinots, bytheir color, which is often less bold than the reds of the Gironde, and bythe fact that these wines nonetheless manage to overwhelm the headand the senses with lighthearted ease. They are a bit jealous, too, of thebest chardonnays, tinged with the flavor of honey like their sweet,strong white wines, yet at once dry, full-bodied, and round. But aboveall they are irritated by the division of minuscule appellations into amultitude of parcels belonging to many owners: to the Bordelais mind,such a practice is incomprehensible and unjustifiable.11 Jean-PaulKauffmann, who, though he is not originally from the Gironde, sangthe praises of its wines for years as the editor-in-chief of L’Amateur deBordeaux, comes straight to the point: “The system of classification ofBurgundies is a work of art, but, like all works of art, it contains an ele-

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ment of mystery. Its beauty is a real puzzle. . . . Burgundy, with morethan a hundred different appellations, is as complex as the duchy of thesame name in the time of Charles the Bold. With fifty-one hectares, theClos Vougeot consists of some ninety parcels divided among eighty dif-ferent owners. Nothing lasting can be built on such subtleties.”12

Let it be said, too, that the Bordelais hardly get along with thesecrafty, food-loving peasants, whose hands are calloused and deformedby manual labor, their heads habitually covered by an old cap; who rolltheir rs and who are given to telling crude jokes when they get together,drinking to excess like their ancestors, the bearded Gauls and ancientBurgundians. None of this prevents them from having access to largepiles of money, in the form of real estate and business profits both,which they spend on expensive foreign cars like so many vulgar nou-veaux riches.

Some years ago, the television host Bernard Pivot devoted his Christ-mas show to the subject of good eating and fine wine. One of his guests,the Bordelais Jean Lacouture, expressed a rather favorable opinion ofone glass he was given to taste. On learning that it was a fine Burgundy,Lacouture replied, “Burgundy, really? I had no idea. It’s excellent, butjust the same I prefer wine.” Some years later he acknowledged havingissued this backhanded compliment, saying that he still did not under-stand Burgundies and could fully appreciate only Bordeaux.13 It is truethat poor Jean Lacouture is much to be pitied, suffering as he does froma dramatic impairment of the faculty of taste known as anosmia, orinsensitivity to smells—a fatal impediment in the case of Burgundy!14

In saying as much, however, Lacouture was only following in thesteps of François Mauriac, perhaps without knowing it. Father MauriceLelong recounts a delightful anecdote told to him by the superior gen-eral of the Dominicans, Father Martino Stanislao Gillet. Gillet was liv-ing in Dijon and hoped to be elected to the Académie Française.Mauriac, accompanied by another academician, paid him a visit. Thecandidate took his guests to Aux Trois Faisans and ordered, altogethercorrectly, a bottle of Burgundy. At this point, Lelong relates,


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one of the Immortals, congenitally devoted to a certain vineyard of theGironde, doubtfully pursed his lower lip. There was a long silence, thekind that occurs when a faux pas has been committed. The eyes of theguest searched the eyes of the host, who now found himself in a state ofmost painful anxiety:

“It’s wine,” said the most reverend father, who told this to me with acertain bitter amusement.

“I shouldn’t have thought so,” replied M. François Mauriac, with theinimitable tone of false naivete for which he was famous.15

The epilogue to this story will not come as a surprise: Father Gilletnever became a member of the Academy. Mauriac, for his part, natu-rally placed Bordeaux, his Bordeaux, at the pinnacle: “For me, the supe-riority of Bordeaux comes from its naturalness: it is born of my earth, ofmy sun, and of the attentive love that my people devote to it. . . . Theprimary virtue of Bordeaux is honesty.”16 Extraordinary—to think thathonesty has always reigned along the Quai des Chartrons!

Philippe Sollers, another Bordelais, has expressed himself still moreexplicitly on this point, and far less good-naturedly:

True wine exists only in Bordeaux. I would like to make it clear thatwine which is not from Bordeaux is a false wine. . . . Of course, there isBurgundy! But it’s too full-blooded; it doesn’t have the circulation, thesifting of the various states of matter that you find in the wines of Bor-deaux. It isn’t by chance that one says “beef bourguignon,” for the wineaccompanying it is indistinguishable from the sauce. I know that theFrench much like this sort of thing, but then again, I don’t much like theFrench.

Not content to leave matters there, Sollers went on to indulge a taste fordoubtful historical commentary that would have brought him adefamation suit in the courts of Dijon: “It is no use to recall the imme-morial struggle between Armagnacs and Burgundians—this is a fun-damental reality of French history. There is a France of ports and a con-tinental France, a France of the periphery and a France of the land, a


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France of trade and a central, centric France, which conjures up for methe various episodes of the closing of the nation—the incessant repro-duction of the peasant spirit of collaboration with foreign powers,German or Russian—the supreme tragedy of which in France isPétainism.”17 Sollers reverted to this theme a few years later: “I loatheBurgundy, it is a wine of sauce and blood. . . . It is necessary just thesame that people be made aware of the fact, and recognize that Bur-gundy is not wine, it is a drink used for making sauces. The moreBurgundy one consumes, the more one has the terrible sensation ofdrinking something bloody, not to mention the dreadful heaviness ofthe land that one senses in it as well. For me, then, anyone who likesBurgundy (and Beaujolais) is, let’s face it, a hick.”18

Everyone knows that one of the emblematic monuments of Bor-deaux is the Porte de Bourgogne, thus named by the Marquis deTourny, the royal intendant of the province in the mid-eighteenth cen-tury, in honor of the Duke of Burgundy. A local merchant recently hadthe genial idea of using an image of it on the label of one of his genericBordeaux Supérieur wines, which he intended to call Les Portes deBordeaux. After all, it would have been unthinkable to market a winefrom Bordeaux under the name La Porte de Bourgogne; and yet thiswould have been an honest gesture, elegant and droll at the same time.

Last but not least, there is the example of the great geographer RenéPijassou, who concludes his magnificent treatise on the viticulture ofthe Médoc—the result of fourteen years of meticulous research in thearchives and among the vineyard owners—by paying tribute to the“greatest center of the civilization of vine and wine, that which pro-duced the great vineyards of the Médoc.”19 Even so, like Philippe deRothschild and other true wine lovers, Pijassou himself is not averse toserving good Burgundies at his table (white Burgundies, of course). DidMauriac have such “honest” elegance?

The domaine owners of Burgundy, for their part, fail to understandthe red wines of Bordeaux, which give themselves up to the nostrilsand taste buds with such difficulty until they have reached maturity,


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especially if cabernet sauvignon is predominant. The sweet white winesof Bordeaux sicken Burgundians, and in any case they do not knowwhat to drink them with. The notion that one might produce the samewine on domaines of several dozen hectares belonging to a single ownerhas been totally foreign to them since the Clos Vougeot was dismantledin the nineteenth century. They distrust the Bordelais practice of skill-ful blending, so contrary to their devotion to single grape varieties,small-scale production, and small parcels.20 Most of all, they dislike thepretensions of the lords of the great Bordelais estates and the wine mer-chants and brokers of the Chartrons, with their light southern accents(and English intonations), their bow ties, their tweeds (old, but impec-cably tailored), and their handmade English shoes (worn, but well pol-ished). Many years ago the Parisian poet Raoul Ponchon, a man whoseldom, if ever, touched water, and who inherited the capital’s ancientpredilection for the wine of Burgundy, dashed off a few lines that noBurgundian today would disavow:

Oh! never to have been trailedBy a lackey serving me Bordeaux;I make no bones about it,It’s Burgundy I prefer above all.21

Jean-François Bazin, a former president of his region and bard ofBurgundian viticulture, recalls that during his childhood Bordeaux waspractically never mentioned in the family home of Gevrey-Chambertin.No bottles of Bordeaux appeared on the table: “We abandoned it will-ingly to its medicinal vocation and to its sad fate as the ‘wine of the sick,’contenting ourselves with [drinking] the ‘wine of the healthy.’”22 Peoplemade fun of the shape of the Bordeaux bottle, stretching their necks andhunching their shoulders. A more serious cause for complaint was thestingy Bordelais custom of allowing guests to taste only a little winefrom the barrel: “When you visit a cellar [here] at least you are offeredsomething to drink. Unlike in Bordeaux.”23 Jean Laplanche, a professorof psychoanalysis and formerly the owner of the Château de Pommard,


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had a cruel experience of this practice not long ago, in 1989. “Sincethen,” he says, “whenever I receive visitors from Bordeaux in my cellar,I give them a glass of the newest wine in casks, and then I announce:‘The visite bordelaise is over. Now begins the visite bourguignonne’”—and, with it, the opening of a dozen bottles, some of them quite old,going back through all the great years.24 Ah, what sweet vengeance!

With a great roar of laughter, Laplanche admits that he now enjoysa glass of Bordeaux once it has matured, but that in the past he hadalways found that it resembled the ink he used as a schoolboy.25 As aneminent member of the Confrérie des Chevaliers du Tastevin, anddespite two official and reciprocal visits, he notes that the members ofhis brotherhood have never managed to establish close, friendly rela-tions with their counterparts in the Bordelais confréries. Laplanche addsthat on the wine lists of restaurants in Burgundy one always finds atleast two Bordeaux wines—a small gesture, to be sure, but better thannothing, since the like of it, he says, is never found in the Gironde withBurgundies.26

It must be admitted that exchanges of courtesies of this sort, whosevalue is inevitably a matter of opinion, testify to the existence of a geo-graphic barrier between two impenetrable worlds. With the death ofJean Calvet in Beaune and the recent failure of negotiations betweenChâteau Smith-Haut-Lafite and Château de Pommard, financialinvestment in one region by a house from another is hardly ever con-templated anymore.27 Yet the requisite capital is lacking in neitherBurgundy nor Bordeaux. It is invested instead in Languedoc or abroad.

To hope to be able to heal the rift, and one day to move beyond it, weneed to understand its origins, and therefore to examine not only thewhole cultural and economic history of the two regions, but also thepeople who manage the vineyards, their customers, and, incidentally,various aspects of the natural environment. To use the term incidentallyin this context may seem an affront to the viticulturalists and the manyprofessional experts who assist them in their work—soil scientists,agronomists, biologists, chemists, oenologists, lawyers, bankers, and


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geographers, all of whom have devoted years of research to explainingthe nuances of winemaking. Yet after listening to Philippe Sollers, onecannot reasonably suppose that a few hours of sunshine and a bit moreor less gravel will suffice to bridge the gap.

Roger Dion, in his masterly Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France desorigines au XIXe siècle (1959), which remains a revolutionary piece ofscholarship even today, was right to insist on the importance of the con-sumer: what connoisseurs want, producers achieve by bending the landto their will. If the wines of Bordeaux and Burgundy do not resembleeach other, this is largely because of their distinctive histories, notwith-standing the indisputable differences between the soils and climatesthat gave birth to them. Conversely, it is a very clever person who cantell what separates certain vins technologiques made in California fromones made in Australia, even though these places are some twelve thou-sand miles apart and their physical environments still more distinctfrom each other than those of Bordeaux and Burgundy. The reasonthese wines are so similar, of course, is that their customers are the same(right down to their culturally cloned taste buds), the methods of culti-vation and vinification are the same, and the multinational firms thatmarket them are the same. This may sound a bit like the caricaturedrawn by Jonathan Nossiter in his film Mondovino (2004), whose prin-cipal target is the American giant Mondavi. But Nossiter forgets thatsmall is not always beautiful: there are large, impersonal multinationalsthat make fine wines, and there are small, friendly firms that produceplonk.

Bordeaux and Burgundy do not really resemble each other, either tothe nose or in the mouth, but this is because, when they are honest, theyare at heart geographical wines—vins de terroir, if you like. They are theproduct of different human temperaments, which have created anddeveloped different wine-growing environments in different political,economic, and cultural contexts. My purpose in writing this book is not towiden the gulf between them (Bordeaux/Burgundy is one of those oppo-sitions that the French are so fond of, like right/left, pro-European/


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Eurosceptic, inherited wealth/self-made fortune, believer/unbeliever,Catholic/Protestant, city/country, sea/mountain, soccer/rugby, PC/Mac,Larousse/Robert, and so on),28 but rather to remind my readers that thereare only good wines and bad wines; that among the good ones there mustbe enough to please all tastes; and that the more one drinks them, if theyare at all well made, the more one’s life is enriched.


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chapter 1 weighing the evidence - university of … · 2015-11-27 · in the company of chambertin....

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